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Reaching maturity in portraiture: ‘La Schiavona’ We conclude this group of faces with the first of Titian’s truly mature portraits: the National Gallery’s so-called ‘La Schiavona ’ (literally, ‘The Woman from Slavonia’; the model is thought to have been of Dalmatian origin) (fig. 14). This portrait radiates contentment and self-confidence, and a remarkable power; the sitter has almost been elevated to the status of Roman matron! When the painting was in the Crespi collection in Milan in the early twentieth century it was hung at the end of a long series of doors, to give the impression of the lady of the house welcoming guests, while jealously guarding her property. The figure fills the surrounding space with total confidence. Any timidity such as might be found in the work of Giorgione has vanished; here Titian reaches a standard so high that he could maintain but never surpass it. This signals the beginning of a mature classicism that culminates in such great achievements as Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery. The ‘Schiavona’ provides a perfect parallel with the frescoes executed by Titian between late 1510 and 1511 in the Scuola del Santo in Padua. There are a number of other ‘matrons’ portrayed here, particularly on the right side of the Miracle of the Speaking Infant. It has often been remarked that, with the ‘Schiavona’, Titian intended deliberately to exalt painting above other arts: by including the sculpted bas-relief on the parapet, he seems to proclaim: ‘This is painting, mother of all the arts!’
Fig. 14 Titian, Portrait of a Lady (‘La Schiavona’), about 1511, The National Gallery, London
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Opposite: Fig. 39 Titian (detail of fig. 58)
Life in the world of animals and plants: Albrecht Dürer This change of subject made it possible for Titian to insert various species of animal, as if to make clear that the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt was above all a journey made through the realms of nature. No longer hostile, nature has become a benign protagonist in the drama. One of the most striking aspects of the Flight into Egypt is the fact that the numerous animals are lifelike. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Titian, born and brought up in Cadore in the heart of the Dolomites, was more familiar with the animal kingdom than his friends from Venice or the Veneto. Who knows how many times as a child he had seen and touched such animals, stroking their backs and sensing their warmth? The fox at the lower right (fig. 39) can only be the outcome of direct observation: with its right paw propped against the tree trunk he stretches forward to see who is coming, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. To achieve this objective view, unfiltered by traditional models, Titian set out on a path that had only recently been signposted by another important artist, Albrecht Dürer. The great painter, designer and printmaker from Nuremberg spent more than a year in Venice, from the end of 1505 to early 1507. On his first visit about ten years earlier he had been almost unknown. On his second, he was welcomed with respect and some sizeable commissions, including the altarpiece depicting the Feast of the Rosary for San Bartolomeo, the church of the German community in Venice (now in the Národní Galerie, Prague). The reality of his Venetian experience is summed up in a revealing passage of a letter written by Dürer on 7 February 1506 to his closest friend, Willibald Pirkheimer: ‘I have many good Italian friends who counsel me not to eat or drink with their painters. Many of these are indeed my enemies and copy my work in churches, making it known wherever they can. Then they criticise it and say it is not in the ‘ancient’ style and is therefore no good. But Sambelling [Giovanni Bellini] praised me in the presence of a number of gentlemen. He would like to have something of mine and came himself to see me, begging me to do something for him, saying that he would pay me well. And everyone tells me that he is a devout man, so I am immediately well disposed towards him. He is very old and he is still the best at painting.’ 51
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displays an extraordinary ability to bring close-up details – even the most insignificant ones – into a harmonious relationship with wide, deep, open space with a distant horizon: just as Titian does in his Flight.
Fig. 45 Titian (detail of fig. 58)
Plants and flowers represent another link between Dürer and the young Titian. The broad meadow that serves as a stage for the Flight is studded with all kinds of foliage as well as tall trees. The most astonishing detail is the group of plants crowned with a poppy at the lower right (fig. 45), near the fox. The freshness of this clump of vegetation is captured with exceptional painterly skill, and rendered with such spontaneity that it could be the product of a child’s imagination. Vasari referred to the ‘German’ painters with whom Titian associated when he was planning the Flight as ‘excellent painters of landscape scenery and plants’, and indeed Dürer remains unrivalled among artists for his studies of flora. A fascinating watercolour, the Lily of the Valley and Bugle (fig. 46), now in the British Museum, is generally ascribed to the school or circle of Dürer, but is sometimes attributed to Dürer himself. Either way, it is datable to the period roughly corresponding to Dürer’s stay in Venice. The attention paid to the slightest imperfection, the sensation that there is genuine sap running through the veins of the plants, links studies such as this (which was re-used by Dürer’s workshop in a picture in the National Gallery known as the Madonna of the Iris) to Titian’s approach to botanical subjects, and could partly explain its origins.
The curiosity aroused by Dürer in Venice was due mainly to the fame of his widely dispersed prints. These embody many aspects of the artist’s approach, particularly to the animal world. For Titian it must have been extraordinary to rediscover in the metropolis art which caused him to look again at the rural world of his childhood. The prints recapitulated a series of studies and sketches made in various locations, of the kind discussed above, fixing them for all time. One of the most memorable images in this series is the engraving of the Vision of Saint Eustace (fig. 47). The hunting dogs in the foreground provide a real anthology of canine attitudes and characteristics. A few years 56
Fig. 46 Circle of Albrecht DŸrer, Two Plants (Lily of the Valley and Bugle), about 1502Ð7, The British Museum, London
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plants. In Dürer’s print, rough vegetation pushes the horizon upwards to the top of the page and allows us fully to savour the mood and atmosphere of the forest evoked by the artist. Despite the absence of colour, it conveys an impression of every kind of greenery and vegetation.
Another print by Dürer demands our attention here, this time because of its subject and composition: his Flight into Egypt (fig. 49). Dürer’s woodcut is designed vertically. Titian seems to have borrowed the basic composition, placing his figures frieze-like across the foreground, dense woodland providing a backdrop. In Titian’s version Dürer’s turning Saint Joseph is transformed into a figure who may be a wingless angel, but the dynamic between the two groups of figures is very similar (fig. 50).
Fig. 49 Albrecht Dürer, The Flight into Egypt, about 1504, The British Museum, London
Titian was not the only artist to absorb these lessons from Dürer. A fuller account of this topic than is possible here would show, for example, that both Vittore Carpaccio and Lorenzo Lotto did so in their different ways. It is worth mentioning that Lotto’s altarpiece of the Assumption in Asolo Cathedral, signed and dated 1506, has at its base a predella (fig. 51) with wonderful flowers (including poppies, as in the Flight) and partridges in the foreground, and in the background a broad vista of the Asolan hills. If it genuinely is by Lotto (as seems likely), and if this was indeed its original format, then it must be acknowledged as the earliest painting in Italian art where landscape is the main subject.
Opposite: Fig. 50 Titian (detail of fig. 58)
Dürer was not the only German artist to be interested in the study of nature: the practice of Jacopo de’ Barbari seems to fit perfectly into this group. Jacopo (actually a Venetian) was the author of the masterly Bird’s-eye View of Venice (fig. 1). Very shortly after this was published in 1500, he was appointed painter at the German court of Maximilian (crowned Holy Roman Emperor a few years later), and thereafter may be considered a German artist as well as a German
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Reaching maturity: Noli me Tangere The culmination of this study of Titian’s early career is his small yet monumental Noli me Tangere in the National Gallery (fig. 69), depicting the moment when Mary Magdalene, having found Christ’s tomb empty, recognises her risen Lord. This work represents the full maturing of Titian’s classic style, achieved through his work on the frescoes in the Scuola del Santo in Padua, completed in 1511. The Noli me Tangere is thus to the genre of figures in a landscape what ‘La Schiavona’ (fig. 14) is to the portrait. Here we sense Titian’s pleasure in portraying man in a natural environment, achieving a perfect balance between figures and a landscape. Titian’s greatest achievement in this respect is the celebrated Death of Saint Peter Martyr, painted in the late 1520s for the Venetian church of San Zanipolo, unfortunately lost in a fire. The two human figures in the Noli me Tangere seem to be performing a balletic dance on a ‘stage’ positioned in the very foreground. Titian is able to integrate figures and background by using very subtle juxtapositions of lines. The composition essentially describes a large ‘X’: the ‘legs’ are the figures of Christ and Mary Magdalene, the ‘arms’ the tree and the outline of the mountain peak on the right. The farm buildings are bathed in early morning light, accompanied by a gentle breeze typical of sunrise in springtime; the breeze stirs the grass and lifts the drapery in the foreground. The stone building reflects the first rays of the rising sun (p. 29) and it is impossible not to recall the tower kissed by rays of dawn in Bellini’s Agony in the Garden (fig. 17). In only a few years, Titian had successfully developed the seeds of this genre born in fifteenth-century Venice, raising it to the European canon. His paintings convey a genuinely living natural world that pulsates afresh every time our eye lights upon it.
Fig. 69 Titian, Noli me Tangere, about 1511Ð12, The National Gallery, London
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